Latest news on Mandrake Software are their release candidate Linux version for Itanium, and that their developers are now preparing Object Prelinked versions of KDE for the next Mandrake, dubbed Cooker. But there are also news about lay offs which took place recently over at MandrakeSoft, in which Kevin Lawton, the person behind Plex86 and also the original author of the x86 emulator Bochs, was layed off. Kevin doesn't know what will happen to the ambitious Plex86 project now he parted with the company that previously backed the whole project. Our Take: First of all, good luck to Kevin. We are sure he will find soon another job, as he is an extremely skilled developer. Plex86 is open source, so it may live up, but there is... a small catch. Developing for Plex86 is _extremely hard_. It requires developers with spiffy low level x86 knowledge, it is not a project about a new email or IM client or a new cool-looking window manager. There are not many developers with such deep knowledge, this is why Kevin worked on it with little help from others for so long. When I was part of the original BeUnited's admin team, we had Plex86 as one of our projects to be ported to BeOS. During the period of 1 year, the project changed 3 team leaders (one of them was a proven experienced BeOS developer), each and every one called its quits for the exact same reason: Not enough knowledge to work on such a complex project.

SkyOS is a home brewed operating system, created by Robert Szeleney in the last few years as a hobby project. As SkyOS gets bigger and more advanced, its popularity and importance are also growing, driving the 3-member team to add more and more functionality. Latest in their efforts is the -- already working according to the SkyOS web site-- Linux emulation layer which runs Linux binaries natively, without recompiling. Among their future plans is also a Windows emulation layer. But SkyOS is much more than emulation layers, it has a personality and functionality of its own. Read more for what Robert has to say about SkyOS and its future.

Jeffy124 reports on Slashdot: "C|net News.com is embarking on a seven day comprehensive report on how Microsoft is moving themselves into position to be The 'Gatekeeper Of The Internet' through WindowsXP. The first installment explains the basics of how this is going to happen: Reminders that last for days encouraging users to sign up for Passport, and how Windows will evenutally resemble services like AOL." The second installment explains the whole masterplan behind .NET and how it is going to position Microsoft as a kind of a... global monopoly.

In an interview with the St Petersburg Times, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer stressed most emphatically (is he ever not emphatic?) that his company is not an "Evil Empire." He says, "I don't think it's right and I think it causes people to make decisions which are not even in their best interest . . . A, we're not evil. B, we're not an empire." A Siliconvalley.com article has the entire interview with Microsoft's energetic CEO.

Apple will probably be satisfied this month, seen Motorola completing the G5, the next generation of PPC CPUs, which it will be 64-bit, but it will also run 32-bit code in almost full speed. Apple is preparing a 64-bit version of MacOSX and they insist that porting the OSX apps over to the new CPU, it will be as easy as recompiling the app for the new CPU. The CPU will clock from 1 GHz to 1.6 GHz for its first generation. For now, Apple has released a long awaited dual 800 G4 machine, while it upgrades the iBook and PowerBook series of laptops with more RAM, speed and features. In the meantime, Transmeta announced yesterday their new Crusoe CPU which it will clock 1 Ghz and it will be available sometime next year. Intel is getting ready to release the first mobile Pentium4, which it will start clocking at 1.5 Ghz, while AMD strugles to produce new products that can compete with Intel directly and finds refuge in marketing tricks, renaming their line of CPUs as Athlon XP or Athlon 1800+. Same tricks Cyrix was doing 3-4 years ago when they could not produce CPUs with faster clock speed than the competition.

After 5 months in public beta testing, QT 3.0, the next incarnation of the popular multi-platform GUI Toolkit from TrollTech has been released. Qt 3.0 introduces a large number of new and powerful features: The ability to build platform- and database independent database applications, greatly improved internationalisation and font handling, rich text engine that also supports richtext input/editing in addition to rendering, Qt Designer, a full-fledged GUI builder that now supports main window development, and includes an integrated C++ editor, Qt Linguist provides easy translation of Qt GUIs to different languages, Qt Assistant eases browsing and finding information in the Qt Documentation. In addition there are numerous other improvements such as Multiple Monitor Support, HTTP network protocol support, Support for latest evolutions in GUIs, Accessibility support and 64-bit Safety. Qt 3.0 also features a new and powerful Regular Expression Engine, which greatly simplifies complex text-manipulation operations. The syntax is compatible to, and as powerful as, Perl regular expressions, while at the same time including full support for Unicode. QT 3.0 is the basis for the next KDE and while it breaks binary compatibility, it keeps source compatibility with QT 2.x.